Scala 2.11.0-RC1 is now available!

Please do try out this release candidate to help us find any serious regressions before the final release. The next release candidate will be cut on Monday March 17, if there are no unresolved blocker bugs at noon (PST). Subsequent RCs will be released on a weekly schedule, with Monday at noon (PST) being the cut-off for blocker bug reports. Our goal is to have no more than three RCs for this release – please help us achieve this by testing your project soon!

Code that compiled on 2.10.x without deprecation warnings should compile on 2.11.x (we do no guarantee this for experimental APIs, such as reflection). If not, please file a regression. We are working with the community to ensure availability of the core projects of the Scala 2.11.x eco-system, please see below for a list. This release is not binary compatible with the 2.10.x series, to allow us to keep improving the Scala standard library.

For production use, we recommend the latest stable release, 2.10.3 (2.10.4 final coming soon).

A big thank you to everyone who’s helped improve Scala by reporting bugs, improving our documentation, participating in mailing lists and other public fora, and – of course – submitting and reviewing pull requests! You are all awesome.

NOTE: RC1 ships with akka-actor 2.3.0-RC4 (the final is out now, but wasn’t yet available when RC1 was cut). The next Scala 2.11 RC will ship with akka-actor 2.3.0 final.

Cross-building with sbt 0.13

When cross-building between Scala versions, you often need to vary the versions of your dependencies. In particular, the new scala modules (such as scala-xml) are no longer included in scala-library, so you’ll have to add an explicit dependency on it to use Scala’s xml support.

Here’s how we recommend handling this in sbt 0.13. For the full build, see @gkossakowski’s example.

Important changes

Changes to the reflection API may cause breakages, but these breakages can be easily fixed in a manner that is source-compatible with Scala 2.10.x. Follow our reflection/macro changelog for detailed instructions.

We’ve decided to fix the following more obscure deviations from specified behavior without deprecating them first.

To catch future changes like this early, you can run the compiler under -Xfuture, which makes it behave like the next major version, where possible, to alert you to upcoming breaking changes.

Deprecations

Deprecation is essential to two of the 2.11.x series’ three themes (faster/smaller/stabler). They make the language and the libraries smaller, and thus easier to use and maintain, which ultimately improves stability. We are very proud of Scala’s first decade, which brought us to where we are, and we are actively working on minimizing the downsides of this legacy, as exemplified by 2.11.x’s focus on deprecation, modularization and infrastructure work.

#3103, #3191, #3582 Collection classes and methods that are (very) difficult to extend safely have been slated for being marked final. Proxies and wrappers that were not adequately implemented or kept up-to-date have been deprecated, along with other minor inconsistencies.

scala-actors is now deprecated and will be removed in 2.12; please follow the steps in the Actors Migration Guide to port to Akka Actors

We are looking for maintainers to take over the following modules: scala-swing, scala-continuations. 2.12 will not include them if no new maintainer is found. We will likely keep maintaining the other modules (scala-xml, scala-parser-combinators), but help is still greatly appreciated.

Deprecation is closely linked to source and binary compatibility. We say two versions are source compatible when they compile the same programs with the same results. Deprecation requires qualifying this statement: “assuming there are no deprecation warnings”. This is what allows us to evolve the Scala platform and keep it healthy. We move slowly to guarantee smooth upgrades, but we want to keep improving as well!

Binary Compatibility

When two versions of Scala are binary compatible, it is safe to compile your project on one Scala version and link against another Scala version at run time. Safe run-time linkage (only!) means that the JVM does not throw a (subclass of) LinkageError when executing your program in the mixed scenario, assuming that none arise when compiling and running on the same version of Scala. Concretely, this means you may have external dependencies on your run-time classpath that use a different version of Scala than the one you’re compiling with, as long as they’re binary compatibile. In other words, separate compilation on different binary compatible versions does not introduce problems compared to compiling and running everything on the same version of Scala.

We check binary compatibility automatically with MiMa. We strive to maintain a similar invariant for the behavior (as opposed to just linkage) of the standard library, but this is not checked mechanically (Scala is not a proof assistant so this is out of reach for its type system).

Forwards and Back

We distinguish forwards and backwards compatibility (think of these as properties of a sequence of versions, not of an individual version). Maintaining backwards compatibility means code compiled on an older version will link with code compiled with newer ones. Forwards compatibility allows you to compile on new versions and run on older ones.

Thus, backwards compatibility precludes the removal of (non-private) methods, as older versions could call them, not knowing they would be removed, whereas forwards compatibility disallows adding new (non-private) methods, because newer programs may come to depend on them, which would prevent them from running on older versions (private methods are exempted here as well, as their definition and call sites must be in the same compilation unit).

These are strict constraints, but they have worked well for us in the Scala 2.10.x series. They didn’t stop us from fixing 372 issues in the 2.10.x series post 2.10.0. The advantages are clear, so we will maintain this policy in the 2.11.x series, and are looking (but not yet commiting!) to extend it to include major versions in the future.

Concretely

Just like the 2.10.x series, we guarantee forwards and backwards compatibility of the "org.scala-lang" % "scala-library" % "2.11.x" and "org.scala-lang" % "scala-reflect" % "2.11.x" artifacts, except for anything under the scala.reflect.internal package, as scala-reflect is still experimental. We also strongly discourage relying on the stability of scala.concurrent.impl and scala.reflect.runtime, though we will only break compatibility for severe bugs here.

Note that we will only enforce backwards binary compatibility for the new modules (artifacts under the groupId org.scala-lang.modules). As they are opt-in, it’s less of a burden to require having the latest version on the classpath. (Without forward compatibility, the latest version of the artifact must be on the run-time classpath to avoid linkage errors.)

Finally, Scala 2.11.0 introduces scala-library-all to aggregate the modules that constitute a Scala release. Note that this means it does not provide forward binary compatibility, whereas the core scala-library artifact does. We consider the versions of the modules that "scala-library-all" % "2.11.x" depends on to be the canonical ones, that are part of the official Scala distribution. (The distribution itself is defined by the new scala-dist maven artifact.)

New features in the 2.11 series

This release contains all of the bug fixes and improvements made in the 2.10 series, as well as:

Mutable LongMap and AnyRefMap have been added to provide improved performance when keys are Long or AnyRef (performance enhancement of up to 4x or 2x respectively).

BigDecimal is more explicit about rounding and numeric representations, and better handles very large values without exhausting memory (by avoiding unnecessary conversions to BigInt).

List has improved performance on map, flatMap, and collect.

See also Deprecation above: we have slated many classes and methods to become final, to clarify which classes are not meant to be subclassed and to facilitate future maintenance and performance improvements.

Modularization

The core Scala standard library jar has shed 20% of its bytecode. The modules for xml, parsing, swing as well as the (unsupported) continuations plugin and library are available individually or via scala-library-all. Note that this artifact has weaker binary compatibility guarantees than scala-library – as explained above.

The compiler has been modularized internally, to separate the presentation compiler, scaladoc and the REPL. We hope this will make it easier to contribute. In this release, all of these modules are still packaged in scala-compiler.jar. We plan to ship them in separate JARs in 2.12.x.

Reflection, macros and quasiquotes

Please see this detailed changelog that lists all significant changes and provides advice on forward and backward compatibility.

See also this summary of the experimental side of the 2.11 development cycle.

#3321 introduced Sprinter, a new AST pretty-printing library! Very useful for tools that deal with source code.

A new experimental way of compiling closures, implemented by @JamesIry. With -Ydelambdafy:method anonymous functions are compiled faster, with a smaller bytecode footprint. This works by keeping the function body as a private (static, if no this reference is needed) method of the enclosing class, and at the last moment during compilation emitting a small anonymous class that extends FunctionN and delegates to it. This sets the scene for a smooth migration to Java 8-style lambdas (not yet implemented).

Incremental compilation has been improved significantly. To try it out, upgrade to sbt 0.13.2-M2 and add incOptions := incOptions.value.withNameHashing(true) to your build! Other build tools are also supported. More info at this sbt issue – that’s where most of the work happened. More features are planned, e.g. class-based tracking.

We’ve been optimizing the batch compiler’s performance as well, and will continue to work on this during the 2.11.x cycle.

License clarification

Scala is now distributed under the standard 3-clause BSD license. Originally, the same 3-clause BSD license was adopted, but slightly reworded over the years, and the “Scala License” was born. We’re now back to the standard formulation to avoid confusion.